Lochner v. New York

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Lochner v. New York

United States 1905

Synopsis

In 1897, in response to wretched working conditions at bakeries in New York State, the state legislature enacted the New York Bakeshop Act, as part of the New York State Labor Law. Among other provisions, the act limited the hours that bakers could work. A bakery owner named Joseph Lochner from Utica, New York, subsequently challenged the Bakeshop Act in court, and the suit eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court's upholding of Lochner's challenge to the New York Bakeshop Act became a landmark decision in support of laissez-faire economics and the newly invented legal doctrine of "substantive due process." It also touched off what is commonly known as the "Lochner Era," wherein the Court struck down many economic and labor regulations as violating the rights of businesses. The Lochner Era is viewed in many different ways today, but it is most commonly seen in a negative light, as an era during which the Court substituted its own political will and economic theories for those of legislatures.

Timeline

1885: Indian National Congress is founded. In the years that follow, the party will take the helm of India's independence movement.
1890: U.S. Congress passes the Sherman Antitrust Act, which in the years that follow will be used to break up large monopolies.
1895: Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière show the world's first motion picture—Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory—at a café in Paris.
1898: United States defeats Spain in the three-month Spanish-American War. As a result, Cuba gains it independence, and the United States purchases Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain for $20 million.
1901: U.S. President William McKinley is assassinated by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt becomes president.
1903: Russia's Social Democratic Party splits into two factions: the moderate Mensheviks and the hard-line Bolsheviks. Despite their names, which in Russian mean "minority" and "majority," respectively, Mensheviks actually outnumber Bolsheviks.
1904: Russo-Japanese War, which lasts into 1905 and results in a resounding Japanese victory, begins. In Russia, the war is followed by the Revolution of 1905, which marks the beginning of the end of czarist rule; meanwhile, Japan is poised to become the first major non-western power of modern times.
1905: Russian Revolution of 1905 occurs. Following the "bloody Sunday" riots before the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in January, revolution spreads throughout Russia, in some places spurred on by newly formed workers' councils, or soviets. Among the most memorable incidents of the revolt is the mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin. Suppressed by the czar, the revolution brings an end to liberal reforms, and thus sets the stage for the larger revolution of 1917.
1905: Albert Einstein presents his special theory of relativity.
1905: In the industrial Ruhr region in Germany, 200,000 miners go on strike.
1909: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded by W. E. B. Du Bois and a number of other prominent black and white intellectuals in New York City.
1914: On the Western Front, the first battles of the Marne and Ypres establish a line that will more or less hold for the next four years. Exuberance is still high on both sides, but will dissipate as thousands of German, French, and British soldiers sacrifice their lives in battles over a few miles of barbed wire and mud. The Eastern Front is a different story: a German victory over Russia at Tan-nenberg in August sets the stage for a war in which Russia will enjoy little success, and will eventually descend into chaos that paves the way for the 1917 revolutions.

Event and Its Context

Bakeries

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, baking as a profession, along with most of the American economy, had undergone macroeconomic shifts in the wake of the Civil War and the triumph of industrial capitalism that it heralded. Like most other workers, bakers were moving away from working for themselves and toward working for other people. A large number of bakeshops arose in New York State, due to the ease of opening such shops. There also appears to have been a large demand for bakeshop services as more and more people worked and lived in tenement buildings where doing one's own baking could be inconvenient.

The bakeries were often dark, dank, decrepit, and unsafe for workers and customers. Tuberculosis was rampant and bakeries almost certainly contributed to its spread. Contemporary accounts describe great mounds of dough resting on workers' sweaty bodies and knives being carried in their mouths.

Workers were made to work very long hours, in apparent violation of an 1867 eight-hour workday statute that provided for neither penalties nor enforcement of the requirement. In 1891 New York bakers went on strike for a 12-hour workday.

By 1895 the bakers' workweek appears to have stabilized at around 74 hours. This was long, even by the standards of the day, and bakers' working conditions were particularly odious. New York-based labor unions, especially in New York City, were concerned and sought to achieve safer working conditions and shorter hours by using collective bargaining and strikes, to little or no avail. As a general rule, the labor unions of the day were relatively suspicious of politics in general and of legislative action in particular and followed the bargaining strategy associated with Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor.

Bakers' unions, however, appear never to have abandoned the legislative strategy, and their lobbying appears to have been behind New York State assembly member Arthur Audett's interest in the issue. In 1897 the legislature was preoccupied with a wholesale modification of New York State's General Laws (now known as the Consolidated Laws), which covered labor law in the state.

After dealing with the possible opposition of the Republican political boss Thomas C. Platt, Audett managed to add an article to the new labor law dealing specifically with labor, safety, and health conditions at bakeries (Article 8, "Bakery and Confectionary Establishments," informally known as the "New York State Bakeshop Act"). The Bakeshop Act consisted of three pages of a law that went on for several dozen. The bulk of the Bakeshop Act, Sections 111 through 115, outlined specific safety requirements. However, Section 110 specified that workers in bakeshops covered by the law could neither be required nor permitted to work more than 10 hours in one work-day, nor more than 60 hours in one workweek. The act contained "flexibility" language that allowed more than 10 hours per day if compensatory time off was granted later in the week.

Bakers were never really happy about the law, but it took several years for a serious challenge against it to be mounted.

The Case

Joseph Lochner owned a small bakery in the upstate New York town of Utica. His first violation of Section 110 of the Bakeshop Act took place in 1902, and he violated it several times after that. He repeatedly appealed one of his convictions, which went to the Supreme Court in February 1905. At issue was whether or not the Bakeshop Act's limit on hours of labor was an improper use of the state's "police powers," a vaguely defined set of powers held by the states to regulate on behalf of their citizens' health, welfare, and morals. Police powers could, under certain conditions, override freedom of contract. Although the Lochner decision ultimately did little to define "police powers," it did help to establish the doctrine of "substantive due process," under which laws could be declared unconstitutional on their substance.

Lochner's apparently unlicensed attorney constructed a simple argument concluding that Section 110 of the labor law was contrary to the United States Constitution on three basic grounds:

It did not apply uniformly to all bakeshops but only to those that met the specific definition in the law.
Section 110 could not really be a health and safety law, as such issues were covered by other provisions of the Bakeshop Act.
Section 110 was not a proper use of the state police power (this argument was vaguely constructed at best).

Lochner's attorney argued that these factors made this section of the New York State Bakeshop Act an impairment on Lochner's freedom of contract and that it violated the "due process" clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

New York State, represented by State Attorney General Julius M. Mayer, constructed a monolithic argument; contextual evidence suggests that Mayer was distracted by preparation for another case that he was to argue before the Court within a few months. Unless, Mayer argued, Lochner can show "no basis upon which the state court could rest its conclusion that the legislation in question was a proper exercise of the police power," such policy questions were up to the New York State legislature to decide, not the courts. In justifying the idea of such legislation to begin with, Mayer cited the state's interest in having "able-bodied men at its command when it desires." Neither side attempted to offer a specific definition of the "police powers" of the states.

The Decision

The majority opinion delivered by Justice Rufus Peckham simply concluded that Section 110 was an unfair and unwarranted limitation on freedom of contract and that it did not relate properly to public health or safety nor to the specific conditions of baking, and was therefore not a legitimate exercise of the state's police power. Somewhat oddly, Peckham specifically cited the fact that there was no means by which an emergency situation could override the hours limit (though Peckham failed to cite an example of a baking emergency). Peckham failed to develop a systematic legal test to determine what would and would not be a legitimate exercise of the police power.

Peckham went further, however, and insulted the legislature, suggesting that "other motives" than the public health and safety were behind the Bakeshop Act. Finally, Peckham argued that there was no empirical reason to enact such a law, as "common sense" dictated that baking was not a particularly dangerous profession.

Justice Harlan wrote the minority opinion. Harlan's minority opinion and Peckham's majority opinion agreed in the essentials. They agreed that the police power existed and that it was held by the states; they agreed further that it could override the implied freedom of contract in the Fourteenth Amendment's "due process" clause. Harlan, however, was willing to give the states the benefit of the doubt, and Peckham was not. Harlan argued that the burden of proof was on those who wished to repeal such laws, and that the presumption was in favor of the state legislatures. Peckham was unwilling to make that presumption. Harlan, further, had clearly done a good deal of reading on the subject of baking and came to the same conclusion as the New York State legislature: baking indeed was an abnormally dangerous profession, and it was conceivable that New York State could have had a legitimate public health rationale for enacting the law it did. Peckham, by contrast, fell back on "common sense" and offered no empirical evidence, nor did he display any knowledge on the subject of baking or of labor hazards in general.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's dissenting opinion has entered the lexicon of American legal history to the point that Harlan's dissent is often seen as of secondary importance. However, apart from a bitter remark that the U.S. Constitution did not automatically legitimize the ideas of social theorist Herbert Spencer, the Holmes dissent amounted to a shorter and more strongly worded version of the Harlan dissent.

The Impact

As a general rule, the Lochner case is studied in the context of American legal rather than labor history. It is commonly seen in a negative light, as having ushered in the so-called Lochner Era, wherein the U.S. Supreme Court, using the "substantive due process" doctrine, sought to enforce a social Darwinist ideology and in so doing felt free to override state legislatures on what were essentially political questions. In relatively recent years, however, revisionist historians have attempted to argue that the Lochner Era represented not an imposition of the will of the Court on the will of the state legislatures, but rather a "restoration" of the American Constitution and American constitutional principles that had been under "assault" by the economic regulations enacted by the state legislatures. The conventional view, however, still seems to be the most commonly accepted one in most quarters.

Whatever view is taken, by the early to mid-1930s, when the Great Depression caused the courts to rethink laissez-faire capitalism and to uphold several economic and labor regulations, such as minimum wage and maximum hours laws, the Lochner Era was over.

Within the labor movement, the Lochner decision appears to have achieved relatively little notoriety or attention. This is probably because during the Lochner Era organized labor continued to organize workers, conduct strikes, and negotiate with employers for shorter working hours, higher wages, better working conditions, vacation time, and the like, just as they had always done. Within 30 years of the Lochner decision, many of the critical reforms for which labor had fought were enshrined in federal law, via the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Key Players

Audett, Arthur J.: Audett was a member of the New York State Assembly and primary author of the Bakeshop Act.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1841-1935): Holmes was a native of Boston, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard University. He was a Theodore Roosevelt appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court from 1901 to 1932 and is an extremely important figure in American legal history. His notoriety in the Lochner decision comes chiefly from an extremely short and notably scathing dissent wherein he argued that the majority opinion was attempting to impose a social Darwinist ideology on the American Constitution. From a legal perspective, the other, less-cited dissent is of greater importance to the case itself, but it was Holmes's dissent that framed the continuing political and academic perception of the decision and its meaning.

Peckham, Rufus (1838-1909): Peckham was a native of Albany, New York, and a prominent lawyer affiliated with the Democratic Party. He was appointed by President Grover Cleveland to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1895 and served there until his death. Peckham had previously served as a judge in various New York State courts. He is best remembered for his Lochner decision.

Platt, Thomas C. (1833-1910): Platt was a native of Oswego, New York. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1873 to 1877 and became a U.S. senator in 1881 but resigned almost immediately following a patronage dispute with then-President Garfield. He later served in the Senate from 1897 to 1909. In New York State, his prominence derived more from his prestige as a Republican political boss than from his various terms in elected office. His chief role in the Lochner matter was to allow Arthur Audett to persuade him to let the Bakeshop Act pass.

See also: Fair Labor Standards Act.

Bibliography

Books

Bernstein, David E. Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

Friendly, Fred W., and Martha J. H. Elliott. The Constitution: That Delicate Balance (Landmark Cases That Shaped the Constitution). New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1984.

Gillman, Howard. The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Kens, Paul. Judicial Power and Reform Politics: The Anatomy of Lochner v. New York. Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 1990.

——. Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial. Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 1998.

Padover, Saul K., and Jacob W. Landynski, eds. The Living U.S. Constitution. New York: New American Library, 1983.

Wall, Joseph F. "Lochner v. New York: A Study in the Modernization of Constitutional Law." In AmericanIndustrialization, Economic Expansion, and the Law, edited by Joseph R. Frese and Jacob Judd. Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1981.